In 2009, the BBC ran a reporting piece on the Arctic featuring the esteemed polar scientist Peter Wadhams of Cambridge University. The Catlin Arctic Survey, a project set out to answer vital scientific questions about sea ice in the Arctic, had just returned with its findings. Its central purpose had been to gather evidence on how long a warming planet could sustain an all-year ice cover at its northern pole: How long did the Arctic ice cover have left? The results, said Wadhams, who has studied the Arctic since the 1970s, were terrifying. The survey supported the “new consensus view that...